Thursday, August 23, 2012

The Legend of Black Mammy Doll. Final chapter.

As I said in an earlier post, making Black Mammies started to come up to my mind more and more until I designed the pattern and got one, which I gave to my dear sister-in-law as a Christmas present. Then I reduced the pattern to 80% and 60% smaller sizes and got a bunch of them!

Close up, they are the 80% smaller dolls. I love adding buttons to the arms because they become very movable.
Acercamiento de las mamis, estas son las que fueron reducidas a un 80%. Me gusta ponerles botones para coserles los brazos porque les da mucho movimiento.

I did the dolls following the process of sewing the bodies, stuffing them with fiberfill, attaching the arms with buttons, hand sewing the legs, needle sculpting the noses, mouths, and knees, and hand painting them with acrylics.

Once I started to needle felt their hair I found out how cool it looked the super-extra curly black wool, and I did not have any intention in covering it in the way of the Black Mammies, instead, I brought those braids up their heads for full, proud display of such a nice kind of hair.

I wanted to make a Black Mammy doll following the traditional patterns, but I started finding out that their portraits were not that happy, I saw countless of photo archives of barefoot, dirty, ragged, sad looking mammies, burdened by endless, unpaid house chores. I am aware of the bad situation of the African-American people in past centuries, specially women, and I wanted to make a dignified doll, proud of herself, well dressed, with awesome boots! I wish I could change the History of the world just by making dolls.